Advanced Micro Devices needs India to keep up with the growing demand for its products, its executive vice president and chief technology officer told CNBC in an exclusive interview.
“We have a global workforce. Our design efforts are global and doubling down on those investments, continuing our growth in India, are all part of what we need to stay pace with the growing demand for our products,” Mark Papermaster said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Thursday.
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On Friday, AMD announced its plans to invest approximately $400 million to continue its growth in India. The investment will go toward building the firm’s largest design center, which is expected to open before the end of 2023, as well as the addition of about 3,000 engineering roles by the end of 2028.
“We started with a small number of employees in Delhi in 2001. Today, we have over 6,500 full-time employees, and over 3,500 service contractors. So it’s with a population of about 10,000 people. And we’re really pleased to be growing our investment in India — a huge part of our portfolio and product development,” said Papermaster.
AMD is one of the few firms that produces the high-end graphics processing units needed for artificial intelligence. AMD processors can be found in a wide range of devices including computers, servers and gaming consoles.
“We’re really excited about MI300, our next generation AI chip. It’s going to take on the most powerful AI chip in the industry. And it couldn’t come at a more needed time because the industry needs more AI computing power,” said Papermaster.
“And we have a design aspect of that being done in India. We now have the India design team touching almost every product that we develop in AMD,” said Papermaster.
Ruben Roy, managing director of equity research at financial services firm Stifel, said that AMD is the “only viable alternative” to Nvidia’s high-performance H100 and A100 GPUs.
“They’re pushing very hard. R&D is going up. They are investing quite aggressively in AI,” Roy said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia” on Wednesday.
Papermaster told CNBC, “What we focus on is leveraging the latest cutting-edge semiconductor nodes. And we bring our design prowess to really differentiate our products.”
“That’s where India is so huge for us. Because if you look at our global population, about 25% of it is in India, and we are an engineering dominated workforce,” he said.
Papermaster said AMD is looking into further diversifying its supply chains. This comes amid U.S.-China tensions that have impacted firms doing business in both countries.
“In terms of de-risking our manufacturing, we do have a diversified supply base. And we will continue to look at options in terms of adding more diversity to our supply base,” he said.
“As a semiconductor design company that has a strong base in India, we believe getting that diversity of the supply chain, and getting key elements of that in India, will be helpful to us.”
He further added that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a “strong program” called “Make in India” which offers incentives for semiconductor companies to develop, manufacture and assemble products in India.
In an earnings call Tuesday, Lisa Su, CEO of AMD, said that China is an important market for the firm.
She also said that there is an opportunity to develop a China-specific AI chip in order to comply with U.S. export curbs, in a move that will follow rivals Nvidia and Intel.
Synopsys logo is seen displayed on a smartphone with the flag of China in the background.
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The U.S. government has rescinded its export restrictions on chip design software to China, U.S.-based Synopsys announced Thursday.
“Synopsys is working to restore access to the recently restricted products in China,” it said in a statement.
The U.S. had reportedly told several chip design software companies, including Synopsys, in May that they were required to obtain licenses before exporting goods, such as software and chemicals for semiconductors, to China.
The U.S. Commerce Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC.
The news comes after China signaled last week that they are making progress on a trade truce with the U.S. and confirmed conditional agreements to resume some exchanges of rare earths and advanced technology.
The Datadog stand is being displayed on day one of the AWS Summit Seoul 2024 at the COEX Convention and Exhibition Center in Seoul, South Korea, on May 16, 2024.
Chris Jung | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Datadog shares were up 10% in extended trading on Wednesday after S&P Global said the monitoring software provider will replace Juniper Networks in the S&P 500 U.S. stock index.
S&P Global is making the change effective before the beginning of trading on July 9, according to a statement.
Computer server maker Hewlett Packard Enterprise, also a constituent of the index, said earlier on Wednesday that it had completed its acquisition of Juniper, which makes data center networking hardware. HPE disclosed in a filing that it paid $13.4 billion to Juniper shareholders.
Over the weekend, the two companies reached a settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, which had sued in opposition to the deal. As part of the settlement, HPE agreed to divest its global Instant On campus and branch business.
While tech already makes up an outsized portion of the S&P 500, the index has has been continuously lifting its exposure as the industry expands into more areas of society.
Stocks often rally when they’re added to a major index, as fund managers need to rebalance their portfolios to reflect the changes.
New York-based Datadog went public in 2019. The company generated $24.6 million in net income on $761.6 million in revenue in the first quarter of 2025, according to a statement. Competitors include Cisco, which bought Splunk last year, as well as Elastic and cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon and Microsoft.
Datadog has underperformed the broader tech sector so far this year. The stock was down 5.5% as of Wednesday’s close, while the Nasdaq was up 5.6%. Still, with a market cap of $46.6 billion, Datadog’s valuation is significantly higher than the median for that index.
A representation of cryptocurrency Ethereum is placed on a PC motherboard in this illustration taken on June 16, 2023.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Stocks tied to the price of ether, better known as ETH, were higher on Wednesday, reflecting renewed enthusiasm for the crypto asset amid a surge of interest in stablecoins and tokenization.
“We’re finally at the point where real use cases are emerging, and stablecoins have been the first version of that at scale but they’re going to open the door to a much bigger story around tokenizing other assets and using digital assets in new ways,” Devin Ryan, head of financial technology research at Citizens.
On Tuesday, as bitcoin ETFs snapped a 15-day streak of inflows, ether ETFs saw $40 million in inflows led by BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust. ETH ETFs came back to life in June after much concern that they were becoming zombie funds.
The price of the coin itself was last higher by 5%, according to Coin Metrics, though it’s still down 24% this year.
Ethereum has been struggling with an identity crisis fueled by uncertainty about the network’s value proposition, weaker revenue since its last big technical upgrade and increasing competition from Solana. Market volatility, driven by geopolitical uncertainty this year, has not helped.
The Ethereum network’s smart contracts capability makes it a prominent platform for the tokenization of traditional assets, which includes U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoins. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee this week called Ethereum “the backbone and architecture” of stablecoins. Both Tether (USDT) and Circle‘s USD Coin (USDC) are issued on the network.
BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund (known as BUIDL, which stands for USD Institutional Digital Liquidity Fund) also launched on Ethereum last year before expanding to other blockchain networks.
Tokenization is the process of issuing digital representations on a blockchain network of publicly traded securities, real world assets or any other form of value. Holders of tokenized assets don’t have outright ownership of the assets themselves.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood this week that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and the Senate passage of its proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act.
Ether, which turns 10 years old at the end of July, is sitting about 75% off its all-time high.
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